While printing a document, a thermal printer may experience one or more types of printing errors. For example, the printer may print too light or too dark for the type of information being printed. Further, for thermal printers that print on two sides of a document, the printer may experience a thermal print head power distribution failure when the printer is simultaneously printing on two sides.
For an example, travel documents such as airline boarding passes or rental car coupons typically include printed characters, traveler personal data, flight or rental car data and/or machine readable data such as a barcode. A thermal printer may print these data too light. When the travel documents are two-sided documents, a rear or secondary side may include a road map, way-finder data, or corporate logo, all with heavy segmented printing, i.e., solid print areas. The printer may print these solid print areas too dark. Both overly light and dark printing negatively affect the readability of printed documents.
It would be advantageous to provide a method of controlling thermal printing that controls print quality based upon the type of information being printed and prevents thermal print head power distribution failure when printing on two sides.